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Lisa Anderson
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Conventional wisdom about public policy holds that policy decisions are the domain of governments. But in the last two decades, the significance of government both in making public policy decisions and supporting the social science research used to make these decisions has begun to diminish. The era of globalization, with more public policy being made in the private sector, has begun to raise important questions about the relationship between social science research and public policy decisions.
On Monday, October 23, Lisa Anderson, dean of Columbia's School of International and Public Affairs, will deliver the first in a series of three Leonard Hastings Schoff Memorial Lectures. Throughout the course of these lectures, Anderson will explore the changing relationship between the study of social science - data like census, public health records and crime statistics - and the policy that is created based on this information.
"Public policy is less and less associated with its classic locus in government," says Anderson, noting that now policy decisions often originate with private-sector consultants, not-for-profit organizations, non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations. "How have the ideas, the assumptions and the methods of the social sciences permeated the cultures and societies they have?," she asks. "And if we remove the state as the point of contact between the social sciences and public policy, how will they interact and shape the formulation of policy and the development of social science in the future?"
Anderson will give the first lecture Monday, October 23, at 8 p.m. at the International Affairs Building, 420 W. 118th Street, Room 1501. The other two Schoff lectures will be delivered at the same time and place, Monday, October 30, and Monday, November 13.
In the first lecture, titled "The American History of Scientific Policy and Policy-Making," Anderson will discuss the history of social science and public policy and how their relationship evolved with the growth of the modern welfare state and the U.S. rise to world power.
The modern discipline of social science, of collecting information on patterns of public and private life, was once used to carry out the affairs of the state; a census count, for instance, would indicate how many citizens owed taxes. "As sovereignty slipped from the crown to the people," says Anderson, "what had been an apparatus serving the ruler transformed into a public bureaucracy whose purpose was not only to monitor but to enhance the welfare of society."
Throughout her speech, Anderson will discuss the evolution of social science into a purely scientific discipline and trace attempts, largely in academia, to reconcile the social science data with the realities of implementing policy and train people to bring together the hard data with the skills needed to shape public policy.
In her next lectures, "A Marketplace of Ideas: Social Science and Public Policy Beyond Government," and "Global Public Policy and International Social Science," Anderson will tackle the notion that the significance of government in both making public policy and supporting social science research is diminishing, and explore how this shift will reshape the relationship between social science and policy.
One of the world's leading experts on the Middle East and North Africa, Anderson joined Columbia in 1986 and was named dean of the School of International and Public Affairs in 1996. She has served as chair of Columbia's political science department and director of Columbia's Middle East Institute. Most recently, she served as editor of Transitions to Democracy, (Columbia University Press, 1999).
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